Dr. Asma Mehan, Ph.D.

Author, researcher, educator, and architect

Asst Prof. Dr. Asma Mehan, Ph.D. is a researcher, educator, and architect working at the intersection of architectural humanities and critical urban studies. She is currently an assistant professor at Texas Tech University College of Architecture. She is the author of the books Tehran: From Sacred to Radical (Routledge, 2022) and Kuala Lumpur: Community, Infrastructure, and Urban Inclusivity (Routledge, 2020). She has authored over 50 articles and essays in scholarly books and professional journals in multiple languages, such as English, Persian, and Italian, on critical urban studies, architecture, urban planning, housing, and heritage studies. 

Sheida Mohamadi

Poet, writer, scholar, and journalist

Sheida Mohamadi was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Mohamadi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Persian Language and Literature from the University of Tehran and a Master’s degree of Science in Communication from Purdue University. She was the first Poet in Residence at the Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine for the 2015-2017 academic year. She lectured on Persian poetry, prose, history and folklore, structure, and linguistic roots. Mohamadi researched contemporary Persian poetry. Her research: The Idea of Homeland in Modern Persian Poetry, which was published in the Association of Iranian Studies Newsletter, in April 2020. She also taught courses focusing on Persian literature and historical texts and published two books and one CD while being there. In 2010, she became a Poet in Residence at the University of Maryland where she offered workshops to graduate students in classics to contemporary Persian poetry and short stories. Mohamadi has published six books and one audio CD. Her first book, a work of lyrical prose titled The Moonlight Opened its Heart, Lady, came out in 2001 and her second book, a novel titled The Legend of Baba Leila was published in 2005. Her third book, The Snapshot of Lovemaking is a collection of poems published in 2007. Mohamadi’s next collection of poems, Crimson Whispers was published in 2015. Another collection of her poems I Blink and You Turn Peacock and Hug Me Against the Haze was published at the Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of Irvine California during the spring of 2016 and 2017 respectively. Mohamadi also published an audio CD, in which she recites fifty of her poems from her book “I Blink and You Are a Peacock”, That work was accompanied by the cellist, Homayoun Khosravi music.

Her poems have been translated into different languages, including English, French, Arabic, Czech, Turkish, Kurdish, Urdu, and Swedish. Mohamadi published the first issue of bimonthly literature, Tarh magazine in August 2016. She concentrated on contemporary Persian poetry, short stories, and art. Sheida also was an editor and writer of the women’s page (Safheh-ye Zanan) of Iran newspaper in 2002-2003 and at Farhangestan-e Honar Monthly Review in 2003, both in Tehran, Iran. She has been a member of the Pen Center USA since 2010.

Shana Nys Dambrot

Art critic, curator, and author

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Art & Cake, and Artillery. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes book and catalog essays, curates and juries exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram photographer and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis (2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, is a recipient of the 2022 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, and the 2022 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism award for Critic of the Year. 

Zoya Emami

Creative, artist, and writer

Zoya Emami is a Los Angeles-based creative, artist, and writer. She grew up in a small town in Colorado and has navigated queerness and identity throughout her life. Her work embodies all these elements. She is inspired by the poetry of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, as well as the Persian classical poets, Hafiz and Rumi. Emami recently turned twenty-one and hopes to share her experiences and connect with others through art and movement and in drawing on ancestral pain and healing.

Susan Skeele

Poet, writer and performer

Susan Skeele is an American poet, writer, mother and performer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds a master’s degree from Antioch University in dance/movement therapy, and an undergraduate degree from Naropa University. Susan has collaborated as writer, performer, director and choreographer in numerous staged ensemble performances for four decades, including with Ecotone Physical Theater in Albuquerque, and at Teatro Paraguas and Currents New Media festival in Santa Fe. From 2017 – 2022, she immersed herself in writing, mask-work, buffoonery, clowning and ensemble performance as company member with Santa Fe’s Lecoq-influenced Theater Grottesco. Since 2009, Susan has studied the rigorous improvisation form Action Theater with its founder, internationally known performer Ruth Zaporah. Susan continues to be captivated and humbled by collaborative creative practices, and deeply appreciates how they deconstruct the habitual and expand opportunities for imagination and empathy. She is especially passionate about the art of listening as it relates to creative collaboration, finding that to listen deeply is to inhabit an original state of play that gives rise to new futures, and reframes memory.

Nenye Nnaemeka

Entrepreneur and creative

Nenye Nnaemeka is an entrepreneur with an educational background in public administration. She was born and raised in Nigeria. Inherently creative, she always longed to do expressive art and writing since her teenage days and finally ventured into that world as an adult. On a humanist note, she is a visionary obsessed with the concept of a thriving world. On an artistic level, Nenye is an emerging creative provocateur. As a creative provocateur, she merges graphics with provocative poetry and quotes to craft a narrative of social progress— one where personal and social issues, through the stimulation of thoughts, dialogues, conversations, and interactions, lead to positive change.

Dr. ​Alborz Ghandehari, Ph.D.

Performance poet, writer, and assistant professor

Alborz Ghandehari is a performance poet, writer, and assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. Both his creative and non-fiction works are reflections on migration, diaspora, and social struggle. Born to an Iranian immigrant family and raised in the United States, Ghandehari writes and performs to convey shifts in his political consciousness, whether through his experience as a queer Iranian American, or through the politics of protest in the two countries to which he is tied: the United States and Iran. His recent work includes performance poems at Salt Lake’s 2021 Living Traditions Festival and the 2019 Spectra Queer Arts Festival in which his piece “A Politics of Desire” garnered critical acclaim in The Utah Review and loveDancemore. Ghandehari is also a graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, BFA in Acting. His acting credits include works for the San Francisco-based Golden Thread Productions, the first theater company in the United States devoted to artists of Middle Eastern descent.

As a scholar, he is the author of a non-fiction scholarly book, under contract with Northwestern University Press and forthcoming in Fall 2024, titled Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle.

Hasti Jafari

Playwright, theater-maker and cartoonist

Hasti Jafari is a playwright, theater-maker and cartoonist originally from Iran. They enjoy making playgrounds through their art, as a way to address elephants, whales, flying vacuum cleaners, and other creatures in the room. Their plays have occasionally been produced in Tehran and San Francisco in both student and professional settings. They’re a theater graduate from the University of Tehran and are currently working towards their MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University, where they’re also teaching Creative Writing. In 2021, they were awarded the Marcus recruitment award for their play “Ophelia of Bicycles”. 

Mina Etemad

Journalist, writer, and producer

Mina Etemad (1987) is a journalist, writer and podcast producer. Her work primarily focuses on art, with a particular emphasis on exploring themes such as migration and animal rights.

After graduating from the research master Dutch Literature from the University of Amsterdam in 2013, she began working in the field of media. Mina was a researcher for radio and tv programs such as “Nooit Meer Slapen” and “Mondo” before she became a full time freelancer in 2020.

Currently, she is the host of the podcast “DOCS”, a weekly series featuring audio documentaries about varying themes. Mina creates audio works and podcasts herself, and contributes to prominent Dutch newspapers and magazines like De Volkskrant and the VPRO Gids.

Her first audio documentary, “Volwassenen lachen niet” (Adults Don’t Laugh), was released in 2021 on the podcast DOCS. In the piece, she explores the question whether she should celebrate or commemorate the day she arrived in the Netherlands. In conversation with her family, she invents a ritual for that day, which they carry out together. For Mina, it is a way to seek beauty in pain and to find a balance between cherishing and letting go of melancholy. What we carry with us from the past and how we subsequently shape the present, is a recurring theme in her work.

She has produced several other audio stories and audio installations, as well as written articles, short stories and reviews. Right now, she is working on a couple of podcast series and a book about what the individual, cultural and societal heritage of people who have migrated to the Netherlands can look like, especially those who do not want to have children.

Bahar Momeni

Author and educator

Born and raised in Iran, Bahar is a Ph.D. candidate in literature and an instructor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. The political upheaval in Iran, was the catalyst for Bahar’s migration to the United States in 2013. Women’s struggles and resistance in daily life are the focal points of her creative work and research. For the past three years, Bahar has been working on producing her debut semi-autobiographical graphic novel; The Trees We Carry.

Badri Valian

Artist

Badri Valian is a participatory interactive installation artist and a painter, living in the SF Bay Area. She studied Fine Arts back in her home country, Iran, where she received several national awards for her creative techniques, public-oriented, and social Practice art projects. Badri’s artwork investigates personal and social issues such as poverty, systemic racism, sexual harassment, dictatorships and forced displacements.

The prevalent censorship, gender discrimination and inequality she had experienced in her home country of Iran, and its contrast to the life she has lived in the U.S encouraged her to find her voice and make a tremendous shift through her art and eventually be the voice of underserved minorities. Badri mostly approaches her art projects through participatory interaction in which she conducts activities at a certain period of time, integrating different communities and generating new social fabrics. Just last year, she performed her interactive art projects in Santa Fe Art Institute AIR, New Mexico, Berkeley University, Clarion Alley Mural Project, Legion of Honor museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. These days, her interactive art project of ” A Cup Of Tea” is on display in Kyoto; Shibori museum in Japan and her pink painting-installation of “We Only Were The Kids” is on display at the Nave Hall, California College of Arts, San Francisco.

Sarah McCarthy Grimm 

Artist

Sarah McCarthy Grimm started drawing at the age of six when her grandmother, a painter, sat her down in front of an orange at the kitchen table. Her grandmother’s mother was also a painter, and she has carried on this lineage as an interdisciplinary artist whose creative process includes painting, writing, social practice and photography. At Brown University, where she graduated with a BA in Visual Art in 2013, she developed an applied multimedia ethnography approach to community research, continued to study film photography, and evolved her painting practice. In 2014, she adopted the Ramaytush Ohlone homeland known as San Francisco via a solitary cross-country road trip, and has been building her social practice and painting career since. From 2018-2020, Sarah pursued graduate studies at California College of the Arts to build her skills in facilitation and design strategy, completing the Design MBA in May 2020. In her quest for practical tools for working towards social benefit, she found workshop design to be an optimal methodology. She launched Sarah Grimm Studio LLC in June 2022 with the mission of having a positive impact on society through all aspects of her interdisciplinary practice. She has shown her paintings in 4 solo shows and many group exhibitions, most recently with a 6-week solo show MARE LUNATICA at NeueHouse Venice Beach, where she created site-specific Remnants Stained Glass and activated her Collective Imprints framework to create a 8×5-foot collaborative painting on fabric with the community there. Her vision is to build a future where all can express themselves freely and cultivate both individual and collective wellbeing.